No Rest for the Wicked's Crunchy Combat is More Dark Souls Than Diablo First
No Rest For The Wicked sees Ori developer Moon Studios building an action RPG for the very first time. But despite its familiar isometric perspective, the project is very different from popular ARPGs like Diablo and Path of Exile. Combat in No Rest for the Wicked is deliberate, tactical, and every swing of the sword counts. In short: if you like the nail biting experience of Dark Souls boss battles, then it looks like Moon Studios may be making your next favourite game.
“The major goal for our combat was to make it feel super visceral,” reveals Thomas Mahler, Moon Studio’s co-founder and creative director on No Rest for the Wicked. “To make sure that we create a combat system where animations also really matter. That when you press a button, you get really satisfying swings, and that it doesn't turn into spam.”
That last point is important. The term ARPG, at least in the isometric space, brings to mind high action-per-minute gameplay where you’re hammering left-click and deploying abilities the moment the cooldown counter hits zero. No Rest for the Wicked is nothing like that.
“It's about making it feel a bit more personal, a bit closer, a bit more focused,” explains Gennadiy Korol, co-founder of Moon Studios and its director of technology. “It's not this overflow of sensory information where you just cannot really tell what's going on onscreen. You actually feel every single action of your character.
“It's up close, it's focused,” he adds. “It's not 20 enemies on screen all against you, it's encounter after encounter. Every single move matters.”
With these goals, it's unsurprising that Mahler namechecks Dark Souls and Monster Hunter as inspirations. While the team was set on a top-down, isometric camera, they believed they “should probably take a different direction” to most other games using the perspective. That’s resulted in a design document that promises something refreshingly new.
“We definitely also took influence from fighting games,” says Mahler. “We always
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